Edited by Bernard Dewulf. Text by Christoph Schreier, Larry Rinder.

Published by David Zwirner Books.Text by Ulrich Loock.

Raoul De Keyser: Drift, published on the occasion of the eponymous show curated by Ulrich Loock at David Zwirner, is organized around a group of 23 paintings that De Keyser (1930–2012) completed shortly before his death, which have become known collectively as The Last Wall. Imposing stark material and formal limitations, De Keyser was able to revisit in this body of work many of the major themes that occupied him throughout his nearly 50-year career: inconspicuous things close at hand, the landscape of the low lands where he lived all his life and the partition of the picture plane. This elegant catalogue presents plates and details of a selection of paintings, beginning in the 1970s, that emphasizes the tentative way De Keyser chose to explore his themes. Drift reveals an uncompromising artist who continued to pose new aesthetic problems for himself—even at the end of his life—and managed to come up with original and deeply moving solutions.

Since the mid-1960s, work by Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at prominent institutions. Since 1999, his work has been represented by David Zwirner. In 2000, a large-scale retrospective was presented at The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, which traveled to the Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. A major survey of the artist’s paintings traveled extensively from 2004 and 2005 to the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Musée de Rochechouart, France; De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland. In 2009, his paintings were exhibited in a retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany and his watercolors were presented jointly at the Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.

Ulrich Loock was born in 1953 in Braunschweig, Germany. He was Director of Kunsthalle Bern from 1985–1997, Director of Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland from 1997–2001, and Deputy Director of Museu de Serralves, Porto, Portugal from 2003–2010. He currently lives and works in Berlin as an independent curator, art critic and lecturer. He has curated numerous exhibitions of artists such as Michael Asher, Matthew Barney, Marlene Dumas, Robert Gober, Katharina Grosse, Eberhard Havekost, Maria Lassnig, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Gerhard Richter, Wilhelm Sasnal, Thomas Schu?tte, Thomas Struth, Luc Tuymans and Christopher Wool. In 1995, he curated a comprehensive show of Raymond Pettibon’s work at Kunsthalle Bern, and included the artist’s work in the 2006 show The 80s: A Topology at Museu de Serralves.

In the summer of 2012, the acclaimed Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) was preparing a show with David Zwirner, planned for March 2013. His friend, the photographer Jef Van Eynde, visited him that summer. "We were allowed to take a look at a new series of small paintings in his studio," Van Eynde recalls in his postscript to this volume. "In their startling simplicity, these had been reduced right down to the essential. Some of them just had an oversized hook for a hanger, with the canvas simply wrapped around a wooden board." De Keyser died in October 2012, and Van Eynde's photographs of the paintings and the titular wall upon which they were arranged are the only documentation of his intentions for the Zwirner show. This intimate volume gathers these alongside portraits of De Keyser at home and in his studio.

Published by David Zwirner Books.

This book documents the artist's 2009 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. Featured are 50 pieces which make up two complementary bodies of work: recent paintings (most from 2008 to 2009) and drawings (created from 1979 to 1982 made on different types of paper and diverse media, including pencil, ink, watercolor, acrylic and oil chalk). Modest in size, De Keyser's works have a special intimacy that derives from the physical characteristics of the medium itself, as well as the tension created between plane and depth, figure and ground.

Paintings 1964-2008

Published by Hatje Cantz.Edited by Bernard Dewulf. Text by Christoph Schreier, Larry Rinder.

Today revered as one of Europe's master painters, Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser (born 1930) first came to public attention in the mid-1960s as a member of the Nieuwe Visie (“New Vision”) group, alongside Roger Raveel, Etienne Elias and Reinier Lucassen—a fraternity of painters interested in reanimating earlier strains of European abstraction. De Keyser's abstractions balance austerity and gentleness, and retrospectively seem to evoke Color Field painting and Minimalism; usually modest in size, they have a special intimacy derived from a concoction of quiet compositional tensions and a softness of figuration. De Keyser has been a leading influence on a new crop of generation of painters, including Luc Tuymans, Rebecca Morris and Tomma Abts. A beautifully designed publication, Replay traces the steady arc of a 40-year career, and is the essential monograph on this ultimate “painter's painter.”

Published by Walther König, Köln.Text by Ulrich Loock. Introduction by João Fernandes.

Raoul De Keyser's watercolors are a lesser known aspect of his output. Sharing the formal concerns of his paintings, and likewise triggered by specific observations and circumstances, they also offer a readier forum for experimentation than the paintings. This publication presents 59 of De Keyser's watercolors, made between 2000 and 2008.

Published by Ludion.Edited by Paul Van Calster. Text by Steven Jacobs.

This substantial new volume offers a broad and representative picture of the oeuvre of the important Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser, who began his artistic career in the mid-1960s but did not gather international recognition for his abstract canvases until the late-80s. Consequently, much of his early work was never documented. For this volume, author Steven Jacobs spent years charting the early work, tracking it down and having it photographed. More than two-thirds of De Keyser's previously unseen work is documented here for the first time, alongside the artist's most important works and many canvases made since 2000. De Keyser is represented in New York by David Zwirner gallery. Of his 2004 exhibition there, Artforum's Michael Wilson wrote: "De Keyser has often been described as a "painter's painter," which might seem like faint praise but is accurate enough: The pleasures offered by his work are distinctly grown-up, unspectacular, refined, and satisfying. The influence of Miro and Klee is undeniable, but De Keyser remains contemporary in his concentration on the fragmentary and the left-behind, in his implicit acknowledgment of the impossibility of permanence or completion. His palette is timely too, often sharing celebrated countryman Luc Tuymans' dusty greens, pinks and creams."

Raoul De Keyser's mainly abstract art is remarkable for its dimensional realism--that is, its connection of the subjective and objective dimensions of experience. De Keyser personalizes abstraction, he gives it a human face; many of his pictures include motifs drawn from his immediate surroundings or his own personal experience. Instead of searching for an overarching formal principle--as did the pioneers of abstraction from Kandinsky's time through the 1960s--De Keyser attunes his art to the significance of improvisation and chance in all life, and contemporary life in particular. Thus we find in the art of Raoul De Keyser much of the contingency, inconsistency, textual precariousness, modal variety, particularity, unpredictability, disorder and flux that we find in our daily lives. This catalogue, published on the occasion of a touring exhibition of De Keyser's work, documents in sumptuous reproductions the artist's oeuvre over the past twenty years.